Every morning a flood of people passes through the gates of Tian Tan Park, Beijing. 7am focuses on their morning exercises and the social and acoustic space they generate. Figures and small groups scattered amongst the trees fill the park with the percussive sounds of slapping, sweeping limbs, feet brushing grass into geometric figures, the smack of a sand-filled bag against a back or a back against a tree trunk. Each exercise is sustained for at least five minutes and up to two hours. Time and distance are measured out and described by hundreds of simultaneous rhythms, which create a spatial, sonic and bodily language. 7am approaches this social landscape as a language between sight and sound.
About the artist
Born 1963, Cambridge, lives and works in Liverpool. Postgraduate Studies in Fine Art, Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, Netherlands. Stidworthy’s work has centred on the spoken word and its relation to the body, and different notions of meaning and communication. Recent work has focused on aphasia, a condition following a stroke, which effects the language faculty of the brain. Her 2004 film installation The Whisper Heard featured a sufferer of aphasia alongside a three-year-old in the process of learning to speak, both attempting to reproduce, word-by-word, a reading from Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth. As neither of them were able to read, their relation to the word was primarily oral, hovering on the threshold of language. She has exhibited widely, including one-person exhibitions at Matt’s Gallery, London, Netherlands Film Museum, Amsterdam, o.T. Gallery of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany, and Dummy, Etablissement d’en Face, Brussels, 2000, as well as participating in numerous international group shows. She was awarded the Prix de Rome, Netherlands, in 1996, for film and video, and nominated for Becks Futures 2004.